The meaning of “archive”, its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. (Derrida 1996)

Archiving Fever: Artist’s Confiteor operates upon two rhizomes of understanding. One is from a lecture Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, which Jacques Derrida delivered to an international colloquium 25 years ago in London, entitled Memory: The Question of the Archives.The other one is from Charles Baudelaire’s poem, Artist’s Confiteor (1857), by which Baudelaire juxtaposes the artist’s admiration and fear of the beauty of nature, which oddly does not seem to contradict but rather fuse together to render one unifying experience of an artist who feels inconsequential next to “L’insensibilité”(Crosby 336) of nature.

Instead of looking at a forest Now, I see the individual tree

For the duration of a one-night-show, eight artists transport their individual ongoing researches and practices to occupy the underground premises of Hundred Years Gallery – to log in a collective of never-ending thoughts and actions, to simulate with each other while developing a cumulative presentation, reserving the order constructed under the command and commencement, and unfolding as a series of contact improvisations on the mutual ground, physical actions and bodies as materials, as per form performing.

Taking the stake of memory to reconstruct the past, in order to step in the future. The space occupied by the artists becomes a depository of memory, an exchange of presentation and existence, and the beginning for an interrogation: How to archive it? Where is it going to end? Is there an alternative future? (Mark Fitsher, 2016) Both the audiences and the artists are here to work “it” out, “it” being here, “it” being the unforeseen happenings, which would be continually brought up and archived by all of us through both ontological senses and experiences.

In a way, the term (archive) indeed refers … to the arkhē in the physical, historical, or ontological sense, which is to say the original, the first, the principal, the primitive, in short to the commencement. But even more, and even earlier, ‘archive’ refers to the arkhē in the nomological sense, to the arkhē of the commandment” (Derrida 1996)

*The output of this one-night-only live performances will be archived and selfpublished both digitally and physically afterwards, as the first edition of this ongoing conversation about “archiving”. The publication as archive would then be freely distributed with the consent of the audiences and generous donation by friends and supporters.

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PAPRIKA is an exploratory platform produced by Ada Hao and Friends. Taking the versatile transformation of the nutritious vegetable, PAPRIKA works alongside and closely with both individual and collective practices to trigger uncoded and correlated potentials.